Abandoned: A Thriller

• ISBN13: 9780553591347
• Condition: New
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There are rules for dealing with ghosts. Too bad Ree Hutchins doesn't know them.

When her favorite patient at a private mental hospital passes away, psychology student Ree Hutchins mourns the elderly woman's death. But more unsettling is her growing suspicion that something unnatural is shadowing her.

Amateur ghost hunter Hayden Priest believes Ree is being haunted. Even Amelia Gray, known in Charleston as The Graveyard Queen, senses a gathering darkness. Driven by a force she doesn't understand, Ree is compelled to uncover an old secret and put abandoned souls to restâ€"before she is locked away forever....

An ebook exclusive prequel to The Graveyard Queen series.There are rule! s for dealing with ghosts. Too bad Ree Hutchins doesn't know them.

When her favorite patient at a private mental hospital passes away, psychology student Ree Hutchins mourns the elderly woman's death. But more unsettling is her growing suspicion that something unnatural is shadowing her.

Amateur ghost hunter Hayden Priest believes Ree is being haunted. Even Amelia Gray, known in Charleston as The Graveyard Queen, senses a gathering darkness. Driven by a force she doesn't understand, Ree is compelled to uncover an old secret and put abandoned souls to restâ€"before she is locked away forever....

An ebook exclusive prequel to The Graveyard Queen series.BEATEN, BLOODIED, AND BRUISED, and things are going to get worse.

Angelina awakes from a drug-induced haze, alone in the dim parking lot of a biker gang’s clubhouse. Her violent husband, who has left her there to suffer, has kidnapped their young son. The desperate woman slowly makes her way into ! the rundown building with the hope of finding help. Instead, a! gang of bikers, who intend to make the young mother their property, approaches her.
After a disheartening confrontation, a club member with a past full of disappointment and regret insists that the attractive woman ride with him. In doing so, he upsets the balance of the gang, infuriating another member in the process. As they travel across country, Angelina quickly learns that not only does she have to worry about the safety of her child, but her own safety as well.
It will take determination, inner strength, and the help of a handsome stranger in order for her to survive the ride of her life.

This romantic suspense novel will keep you speculating throughout the journey.BEATEN, BLOODIED, AND BRUISED, and things are going to get worse.

Angelina awakes from a drug-induced haze, alone in the dim parking lot of a biker gang’s clubhouse. Her violent husband, who has left her there to suffer, has kidnapped their young son. The desperate woman slowly makes h! er way into the rundown building with the hope of finding help. Instead, a gang of bikers, who intend to make the young mother their property, approaches her.
After a disheartening confrontation, a club member with a past full of disappointment and regret insists that the attractive woman ride with him. In doing so, he upsets the balance of the gang, infuriating another member in the process. As they travel across country, Angelina quickly learns that not only does she have to worry about the safety of her child, but her own safety as well.
It will take determination, inner strength, and the help of a handsome stranger in order for her to survive the ride of her life.

This romantic suspense novel will keep you speculating throughout the journey.SAIL AWAY Adam Drake was determined to clear his name of the false charges that ruined his career at Montgomery Inns â€" and if that meant deceiving the hotelier’s beloved daughter, Marnie Montgomery, and even stowing! away on her boat, so be it. If she had secrets, he would disc! over eve ry single one.... MILLION DOLLAR BABY When Chandra Hill is awakened by a cry in the night, she is shocked to discover an abandoned newborn in her barn. Emergency room doctor Dallas O’Rourke finds himself bonding instantly with the baby â€" and the intriguing woman who brought him in. And when the baby’s adoption becomes national news, he’s stunned to realize he wants a life with them both.... “This campy cool thriller builds to a surprising cliffhanger ending.” â€"Publishers Weekly on Without Mercy (starred review)

On Christmas Eve in 1985, a hunter found a young boy's body along an icy corn field in Nebraska. The residents of Chester, Nebraska buried him as "Little Boy Blue," unclaimed and unidentified-- until a phone call from Ohio two years later led authorities to Eli Stutzman, the boy's father.

Eli Stutzman, the son of an Amish bishop, was by all appearances a dedicated farmer and family man in the country's strictest religious sect. But behi! nd his quiet façade was a man involved with pornography, sadomasochism, and drugs. After the suspicious death of his pregnant wife, Stutzman took his preschool-age son, Danny, and hit the road on a sexual odyssey ending with his conviction for murder. But the mystery of Eli Stutzman and the fate of his son didn't end on the barren Nebraska plains. It was just beginning. . .

For FBI Special Agent Smoky Barrett, her colleague’s wedding is cause for celebration. Until a woman staggers down the aisleâ€"incoherent, wearing only a white nightgown. A fingerprint check determines that she’s been missing for nearly eight years. Her coldly efficient captor toyed with her mind and body, imprisoning her, depriving her of any contact with the outside world. As Smoky fits together the pieces of what remains of the victim’s fractured life, a chilling picture emerges of a cerebral psychopath who doesn’t take murder personally, never makes a mistake, follows his own sinist! er logic, and has set the perfect trap.
  Cody McFadyen on Abandoned

I build my books around the bad guy. I have from the first. I remember making a conscious decision to build my bad guys a little bit outside the box--the box being the firm reality we all know and agree to be.

Why?

Because it’s a lot more fun to write about serial killers that way.

Think about it. Hannibal Lecter is a lot more interesting than Son of Sam. Hannibal is brilliant, complex, unclassifiable. He kills with finesse and precision. Son of Sam was an unhinged lunatic, blowing people away at random. As a character, Hannibal is much more interesting to write about (and read). Because true serial killers aren’t super villains. They’re disturbed, sordid individuals, driven by hungers and needs that usually destroy them from the inside out. A lot of the time, they! ’re socially inept, and not very smart. Their depravity is most often senseless. Writing about what they do would be like writing about a great white shark: it eats because it is hungry and it has such big sharp teeth... you can’t sustain an entire novel on pure savagery. So I like for my bad guys to have a reason for what they do, some guiding purpose. Otherwise, all I’m doing is asking you to pull up a chair and watch the feast--and while something in our reptile brains might enjoy seeing a little bit of the feast, we shy away from the full truth of it.

So when I started thinking about Abandoned, the fourth book in my series, I started by thinking about my killer. I wanted to do something different, but what? The killers in the books earlier in the series had all been pretty "hungry;" in other words, they were appetite driven. "So what," I thought, "about a killer with no appetite at all?"

I actually rejected it at first, but the idea ke! pt swimming back to the forefront. There was something terrif! ying abo ut the idea of someone operating with such cold clarity. It was haunting me--which is always a good sign! I thought about it a lot and finally realized what (for me at least) makes such a killer so chilling: that kind of coldness relegates us to nothing, nothing at all.

The killer who is purposefully cruel, the killer who drools with excitement, still needs our humanity, at whatever level. There is a validation of our value as sentient, emotional beings, even if that only means they need our fear and our horror. It’s a terrible kind of "mattering," but still, we matter.

In the world of the killer I envisaged, we don’t matter at all. There’s no intentional cruelty, no enjoyment of our suffering, no acknowledgement of the value of our existence. He assigns his victims numbers, because it’s a more economical use of oxygen than saying their names.

I saw him, he terrified me, and then I wrote him. He lies within the pages of Abandoned! . It’s my hope he’ll terrify you as well.--Cody McFadyen

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